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In the legends of the Fianna, once current throughout the Scottish Highlands, the use of place-names would have enabled listeners to position themselves imaginatively within the setting of these ancestral tales. Recognisable landmarks acted as placeholders for character and plot. Landscape features served as ‘mnemonic pegs on which to hang the moral teachings of history’ (Basso 1996, 62). Sometimes, like the topo-mnemonic Gaelic riddles described later, the narrative can consist almost wholly of place-names. As two 18th century soldiers from Glen Dochart use a brief rhyme to prove their provenance to one another, knowledge of place for the Western Apache is bound up with knowledge of one’s self and a wider sense of the individual within the community. Like Kenn in Highland River, whose character deepens and dilates as he explores the river’s course, for native Americans in Arizona, selfhood and placehood are completely intertwined (ibid 146).

The blurring of temporality is made possible by the characteristics of singing and spoken poetry of indigenous peoples. The oral culture of the Western Apache, the Walbiri of Northern Australia and the Foi of Papua New Guinea is songbased. Their ancestral songs exist in acoustic space rather than the dimensioned, optical space of goal oriented behavior. Singing, like classical pìobaireachd, is repetitive and non-linear, especially when it accompanies dancing. Such practice helps to create the feeling that the temporal world has been suspended.